The Royal Oak studio where the Spirit of Detroit was born

The Spirit of Detroit — the big green seated bronze in front of the city’s municipal center, holding a golden sun in one hand and a little family in the other — is about as close as Detroit comes to an official symbol. It shows up on basketball jerseys and championship banners. What most people standing in front of it don’t know is that it was modeled a few miles north, in a sculptor’s studio on Woodward Avenue in Royal Oak.

That was the workshop of Marshall Fredericks, and he kept it for more than half a century. Born in Illinois in 1908, he first came to Michigan in 1932 to assist the sculptor Carl Milles at Cranbrook in Bloomfield Hills. He never left the state. From 1945 until his death in 1998 he worked at his Royal Oak studio at the northwest corner of Woodward and Normandy Road, turning out the public monuments that fill the region.

The Spirit of Detroit was the famous one, commissioned in the mid-1950s and dedicated in 1958. The bronze was actually cast in Norway and then treated with acid to give it that distinctive green skin, but the figure itself was shaped here, in clay, in Royal Oak. So was a long list of others — fountains, memorials, and the playful animals that generations of Michigan kids have climbed on without ever knowing the artist’s name.

The studio itself is gone now, demolished after Fredericks died. But the work didn’t scatter. When he passed, the contents of the place — the clay models, the armatures, the molds, the tools — were given to Saginaw Valley State University, which built a museum around them. You can walk through a recreation of the Royal Oak studio there. Back at the corner of Woodward and Normandy, though, there’s nothing to mark it. The traffic just goes by the spot where a city got its face.